1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for audio access to resources in a wide area public network, such as the Internet.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The number of users of wide area computer networks such as the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) is growing exponentially. A number of information services and resources are currently offered on the Internet and WWW. The underlying framework of these services is what a user enters a query on a computer which has access to the Internet. The user can input an address of the resource or can use a search engine for conducting a search of available resources. The query is processed and a connection between the user and a site on the Internet is established with a conventional protocol, such as http. A set of answers are generated and are returned to the user's computer using the protocol For example, stock quote searchable resources have been developed which include information directed to the prices of stocks in different stock markets. A user can query a particular stock, i.e., IBM, or index, i.e., utilities, and the resource returns a set of prices satisfying the query. One problem with accessing the WWW resources is that a user must have access to a computer which is connected to the Internet. However, the majority of the world's population does not have access to a computer. Also, a user that is away from their office or home where their home or office computer is located, and is without a portable laptop computer, is not in the position to access the Internet.
There exists current state of the art audio products on the WWW for embedding audio into a Web page or transmitting full duplex phone conversation over the Internet. The WWW is formed of Web pages authored in a language referred to as hypertext mark-up language (HTML). The products digital the audio or phone conversation with a sound card. The digitized audio is encoded for compressing the audio data in order to provide real time connections over the Internet. The encoded data can be embedded into a Web page by linking the Web page to the encoded data with functions specified in HTML. After a user accesses the Internet with a computer, the user's Web browser receives the encoded audio data when the user accesses the Web page. A user can play the audio on a media player at the user's site by the user clicking on an audio link in the Web page. Alternatively, the encoded audio data can be directly transmitted across the Internet, i.e., in an Internet phone product. An Internet phone application decodes the encoded audio data and plays the transmitted data at a subscriber's phone. The above-described applications have the drawback that the encoded audio stream is a large amount of data which must be encoded and even after encoding the audio data may be slow in traversing the Internet. In addition, the current state of the art audio products require the use of a computer to access the audio services.
One current state of the art attempt to overcome the aforementioned problem of not having access to a computer has been to provide a service which recite verbatim an existing WWW page to a user. The service can be accessed by the user through establishing a voice connection to the service. This solution has the drawback that existing Web pages include text with embedded links, for example, to other addresses of resources which is difficult to read and to be understood by the user. Also, numeric and spreadsheet data which are typically represented in a two dimensional visual table are difficult to convert to speech and even if the table is converted to speech, the amount of data in the table is difficult for the user to understand and remember.
In summary, existing approaches to make information available on the world wide web accessible over an audio interie involve an automatic translation of html documents into audio. However, this process cannot be fully automated, and in general such an approach is not extensible beyond simple text-only pages. For instance, it cannot be used to represent numeric data, spreadsheets, tables and databases effectively.